Lincolnshire Restaurants: The Pig & Whistle
Old friends and an exciting recommendation as Healing Manor’s two-rosette restaurant, The Pig & Whistle, refreshes its menus for March. This month we’re enjoying a reunion with Steven & Charlotte Bennet whose North East Lincolnshire dining room is truly excellent!
The lovely thing about this job is the frequency with which you bump into old friends. I hadn’t seen Steven and Charlotte for a while… shame on me! However, even in absentia I was acutely aware that they were enjoying continued success at the North East Lincolnshire-based country house they took over the running of, back in 2018.
Our visit was to congratulate the couple as they approach a year since becoming the owners of Healing Manor Hotel and its restaurant, The Pig & Whistle.
Steven is a well-known face in Lincolnshire’s hospitality profession. Beyond his 20 years-plus experience working as a chef, he has offered consultancy services to other hotels and restaurants, he’s also run a successful outside catering operation and he’s renovated and run a couple of places of his own, including Oaklands Hall Hotel nearby.
His partnership with Charlotte adds into the mix PR, marketing, management and HR… all of the ‘business stuff,’ leaving Steven to manage day to day operations in the respect of the restaurant and Healing Manor’s 36 bedrooms.
The history of the place itself predates the Domesday Book, in which the medieval manor of Healing is mentioned.
In the 1700s the manor house was rebuilt and later passed into the ownership of the Portman family who took it on as a country retreat – the family’s namesake is Portman Square in London, in which the family had a significant number of property investments.
Latterly the place was purchased with a view to transforming it into a hotel, but those plans were never successfully realised, at least until Steven and Charlotte’s arrival. They’ve renovated bedrooms and common areas, reinvented The Pig & Whistle and made a number of other improvements, even though Covid interrupted their initial time scales.
Things have since returned to normal and happily the business now has a reputation for being one of the best (if not the best) dining rooms in North East Lincolnshire. And our visit last month helps to explain exactly why Steven and Charlotte’s continuing success is well-deserved.
The Pig & Whistle is open to residents and local diners seven days a week. Daytime diners have a choice of dining courtesy of a bar/classics menu, or the à la carte menu (which provides a choice of four starters and four main courses, seven desserts with a Lincolnshire cheeseboard option). During evening service, there’s a choice of the bar/classics menu and à la carte menu, or – on Friday and Saturday evenings – a tasting menu.
The latter is an eight-course selection of smaller dishes based on those from the à la carte menu but with a few extra bells and whistles… or perhaps that should be pigs and whistles.
It was the latter that we enjoyed during our visit, and specifically a few of Steven’s most innovative or popular dishes, each with a story to tell. There’s an introduction to each dish, which is optional – diners are given the choice of just tucking in – but we’d highly recommend listening to lovely front of house team member, Lillia King.
Lillia is warm, brilliant and articulate, imparting genuinely interesting trivia, anecdotes and details about the creation of each dish. I had the printed notes in front of me but Lillia didn’t need them… by rote she delivered a brief but polished description including details of what the optional drinks flight (not just wine) would pair with each plate.
We started with a scallop dish featuring hand-dived Orkney molluscs – lovely and plump – with crispy belly pork and pancetta with pea and sprout à la Français. The pork has been slowly cooked overnight and nestled within a cider and chicken stock reduction.
Next came a Beef Wellington with a cèpe & porcini duxelle with Madeira and shallot. The beef was a stunning fillet steak, blush pink whilst the pastry, Steven said, was a cross between puff and shortcrust, nice and light with a few robust layers. As for the chips? Hand-cut, cooked in beef dripping, with distinct layers almost like a pavé.
Already there’s obvious talent in the kitchen courtesy of Steven, but also his 12-strong brigade – a generous ratio of cooks to diners – servicing the restaurant’s 120 maximum covers. However, one of the nicest aspects of The Pig & Whistle – directly attributable to Steven and Charlotte themselves – is that it’s a relaxed, fun, enjoyable place.
The experience is great, and it’s antithetical to a stuck-up London restaurant, which would doubtless sap all the joy out of each dish with pretentiousness. By contrast, Steven, Lillia and the team bring out the joy in each dish. Take our dessert, for example, a nice twist on my favourite dessert – a classic crème brûlée – which was right up my street.
Colleagues tease me in the office for the sheer amount of tea I drink, so a Yorkshire Tea flavoured crème brûlée was always going to be a winner. Steven is from Yorkshire and his father has banned any other tea bags from the hotel, so their crème brûlée features condensed milk, infused with Yorkshire Tea and served with a vanilla cream, matcha meringue and sorrel.
On the side was… a Penguin. Yep. A Penguin biscuit – albeit a posh homemade version. As a kid Steven would bite both the ends off his Penguin and use the biscuit as a straw to drink his tea. I declined this particular serving suggestion but admired the entirely homemade take on a childhood favourite, from its homemade bourbon biscuit to its malty milk chocolate.
It was a superb selection of dishes, each utilising local suppliers such as fish from Grimsby’s Oscar Cleaves, meat from Swales Butchers, Lincoln-reared pork and lamb, and venison from Market Rasen plus locally-baked sourdough, and cheese such as Cote Hill, Poacher and Dambuster.
Other ingredients are grown in the hotel’s kitchen garden when the seasons permit, with ice creams and sorbets, jams, pickles and chutneys all produced in house.
This was a great dining experience… but also a thoroughly enjoyable one. Much effort, much thought but also much enjoyment is invested in producing really great food and giving guests a really great experience. The Pig & Whistle has been awarded two AA rosettes for the quality of its dining, and it’s easy to see why. It’s highly recommended as a dining room which is skilful and has a warm, welcoming feel. It’s a credit to Steven, Charlotte and the team!
The Pig & Whistle is based at Healing Manor Hotel, 01472 884544, https://www.healingmanorhotel.co.uk/food-drink/pig-and-whistle/
For images of the restaurant’s food and sample menus, read our full feature in the April edition of Lincolnshire Pride at https://www.pridemagazines.co.uk/lincolnshire/view-magazines?magazine=April-2025